Billing supports two kinds of refunds:
- Refund of specific credit card transaction;
- Independent refund.
Refund of credit card transaction is virtually identical to its voiding. Eventually, when you click Refund, the system first attempts to void transaction (to avoid charges by processing center) and only if the void is impossible, proceeds with refund. Such refund cannot be created manually. It is always created when transaction refund request is confirmed by the processing center. It is created as applied to the refunded payment and cannot be unapplied.
Independent refund is money paid back to customer credit card and is not related to earlier credit card transactions. Such refund behaves similarly to invoice or debit memo: it will increase customer balance and should be applied to a payment or to a credit memo. Starting from Billing 4.4.2 an independent refunds with Check/Cash payment method are supported.
A newly added refund always gets the Hold status. Online refunds start being processed right away, and Check/Cash refunds are to be released manually.
Any refund can be deleted only while it is in the Hold status. In this case, if we deal with online refund, the Hold status may also be kept in case transaction has failed. The latter makes difference in online refunds behavior on its deletion attempt. If any actions were performed in connection with online refund processing (for example, a request has been sent to processing center), then such refund is not removed entirely, instead, it gets the Cancelled status, keeps being shown in the Payments list, and is stored in database for reporting purposes. The actions performed over a refund (if any) can be viewed under the E-Transactions tab, within a refund details. In case no actions were performed over a refund, then there is no history to store in database, and refund is deleted entirely.
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